Grounded: Finding God in the World-A Spiritual Revolution

DEDICATION

For Richard

A few lines from Wendell Berry:

Make a story

Show how love and joy, beauty and goodness

shine out amongst the rubble.

Thank you for writing a life with me.

EPIGRAPH

The whole universe is God’s dwelling. Earth, a very small, uniquely blessed corner of that universe, gifted with unique natural blessings, is humanity’s home, and humans are never so much at home as when God dwells with them.

—U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops,

Renewing the Earth (1991)

Everything is related, and we human beings are united as brothers and sisters on a wonderful pilgrimage, woven together by the love God has for each . . . and which also unites us in fond affection with brother sun, sister moon, brother river and mother earth.

—Pope Francis,

Laudato Si (2015)

CONTENTS

DEDICATION

EPIGRAPH

INTRODUCTION

PART ONE: NATURAL HABITAT

CHAPTER 1: Dirt

CHAPTER 2: Water

CHAPTER 3: Sky

PART TWO: HUMAN GEOGRAPHY

CHAPTER 4: Roots

CHAPTER 5: Home

CHAPTER 6: Neighborhood

CHAPTER 7: Commons

CONCLUSION

AFTERWORD

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

NOTES

INDEX

PRAISE

COPYRIGHT

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

INTRODUCTION

Genesis

What we need is here.

—Wendell Berry

I am sitting in the center of a labyrinth at Mount Calvary, a monastery in Santa Barbara, California. The labyrinth, a walking path for prayer, is painted on a concrete patio in a garden behind an old building that now serves as a retreat house. At the edge of the labyrinth are native plants and flowers, including a bright purplish bush called woolly blue curls, where a hummingbird—oblivious to my presence—feeds. Crows, sacred to the Chumash people, who once inhabited this place, fly from the gnarled branches of live oaks to the heights of eucalyptus trees as they caw and search for food. There is abundant bougainvillea, fragrant lavender and rosemary, bright mountain lilac, and coastal sunflower. Along the stone pathways are statues of the Virgin Mary and saints, often paired with benches for those who wish to sit in prayer-filled solitude. A creek, actually a dry bed due to California’s extended drought, runs along the base of the hillside below, where, I suspect, rattlesnakes make their home.

This is a contemplative place. But, oddly enough, it is not terribly quiet. Across the creek, schoolchildren play, cheering for their teams. Not far away, someone stands in back of a building talking on her cell phone. The museum nearby will open soon, and workers are making ready for the day. The sound of traffic on Los Olivos Street is muffled by the trees and shrubs but still obvious. Joggers on the road chat with one another during their morning run. Tourists talk behind the wall that separates the monastery from the mission next door. Neighborhood gardeners mow lawns and blow leaves.

Mount Calvary has not always occupied this particular place. Years ago, I often visited its original location—fifteen mostly vertical acres of mountaintop above Santa Barbara with sweeping views of the Pacific Ocean. When sitting on the porch on a clear day, you looked out toward the Channel Islands and down upon the city. There were distant sounds, voices traveling across the canyons or the faint rumble of the freeway far below, like indistinct prayers rising to the skies. Mostly, it was quiet—stunningly so—the immediate silence broken mostly by birdsong, bells, or monastic chant. So high up, that otherworldly place felt a bit like heaven.

But Mount Calvary’s mountaintop paradise is no longer. In November 2008, the California winds blew hot, and a wildfire destroyed it all.

As the flames engulfed their home, the terrified monks fled downhill to the city. The sisters of St. Mary’s Convent, an order whose house sits behind the Santa Barbara Mission in a busy residential area, took them in. At St. Mary’s, the sisters and brothers lived together, sharing monastic community. Eventually, the monks received an insurance settlement for the old Mount Calvary and faced the decision of whether to rebuild on the top of the hill. After much prayer, they opted to sell the scorched site in favor of finding a different location. The sisters, with only a few women remaining in their small community, offered their property to the brothers. Thus, St. Mary’s Convent became the new Mount Calvary, and the brothers took up permanent residence in the city.

From the labyrinth, I look up and see the peak where the monks used to live. When they gazed down from the heights above, this spot would have been just a speck in their commanding perspective; a person sitting where I sit would have been invisible to them. Now they live in the world, with everything right around them, no longer above it. They have become part of the view, not distant observers of it. Up there, they would not have heard the children, joggers, or tourists or noticed the persistent hummingbirds and noisy crows. Whereas once Mount Calvary offered retreatants the capacity to see widely and dream vast dreams of God, the new monastery invites guests to feel the world more deeply and experience the intimacy of Spirit.

If I think about what was lost, about the beautiful old monastery, I feel sad. I miss the majestic views, the vistas of mountain and ocean, with the towering sense of being above the world. But here, in the center of the labyrinth, peace prevails. The morning fog is lifting. I kick off my shoes. The sounds provide a kind of gentle companionship, reminding me that I am not completely alone with my prayers. Sitting on the ground, I feel warm solidarity with the world of nature and the worlds of all those traveling nearby. And I feel that other presence as well, the heartbeat of love at the center of things, the spirit of wonder or awe that many call God. Any sense of monastic isolation has been overcome with a sense of intimate connection with all that is around, things seen and things less tangible. I, like the monks, am not above. Here, I am with the world. And I find that God is with me.

Maybe coming off the mountain is not a bad thing after all.

Where Is God?

Not so long ago, believers confidently asserted that God inhabited heaven, a distant place of eternal reward for the faithful. We occupied a three-tiered universe, with heaven above, where God lived; the world below, where we lived; and the underworld, where we feared we might go after death. The church mediated the space between heaven and earth, acting as a kind of holy elevator, wherein God sent down divine directions and, if we obeyed the directives, we would go up—eventually—to live in heaven forever and avoid the terrors below. Stories and sermons taught us that God occupied the high places, looking over the world and caring for it from afar, occasionally interrupting the course of human affairs with some miraculous reminder of divine power. Those same tales emphasized the gap between worldly places and the holy mountains, between the creation and an Almighty Creator. Religious authorities mediated the gap, explaining right doctrine and holy living. If you wanted to live with God forever in heaven, then you listened to them, believed, and obeyed.

During the last century, the three-tiered universe and its orderly certainty crumbled. The Great War caused its philosophical and political foundations to wobble, and the whole thing collapsed after the even greater war, World War II, when the Nazis and the Holocaust and the bomb shattered history. God, like the monks from Mount Calvary chased by the roaring inferno, fled down the mountain seeking shelter in the midst of the city.

Oddly enough, most people did not seem to notice at first or, perhaps, were in a state of denial. There were prophets and writers who tried to explain what had happened. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Lutheran pastor awaiting execution in a Nazi prison, understood that the three-tiered universe with its majestic God had been swept away by the war and argued that a new religionless Christianity must emerge from history’s ashes. Elie Wiesel, a Jewish humanist and survivor of the death camps, who daily experienced the horrors attending the end of the world as it was being incinerated at Auschwitz, summed it all up with a plaintive questioning cry, For God’s sake, where is God?

Some postwar theologians and philosophers understood and began to proclaim the death of God. Regular people did not take them seriously, however. Soldiers wanted to get home to their sweethearts, back to houses with picket fences in small towns, back to family, church, and business. There had been so much death; it was too awful to consider that God might have been a wartime casualty as well. Getting back to normal was the key task for mid-twentieth-century people, even if normal was irretrievably gone. Revivals of religion swept through Western nations to restore order and familiarity, first in the 1950s and then again in the 1970s. The faithful baptized legions of postwar offspring, built bigger and taller temples than ever before, and exercised more influence and political power than Christianity had known since the days of Pope Innocent III—all as a testimony to God’s victory over the forces of evil and the triumph of true religion.

It could not last. In the decades that followed, it became increasingly evident that you cannot revive a God for a world that no longer exists. Venerating a God of a vanished world is the very definition of fundamentalism, the sort of religion that is inflicting great pain and violence on many millions of people across the planet and is leading to the rejection of religion by millions of others. Conventional theism is at the heart of fundamentalism and depends on the three-tiered universe. But we now live in a theologically flattened world—we have discovered that we are fully capable of creating the terrors of hell right here and no longer need a lake of fire to prove the existence of evil—and we have found that the ranks of saints and angels seem to have thinned and that no deity will be sending miracles to fix the mess we are in.

Is there another option between fundamentalism and a deceased God? I think so. If hell has moved in next door to us, perhaps heaven has as well. Bonhoeffer and Wiesel, who saw so clearly what was happening, asked the right question long ago: Where is God? That question—and how it is being answered—points toward a surprising spiritual revolution.

In the last decade, it has become increasingly obvious that people no longer fear asking the question, as events have conspired to make the problems of God’s presence—or absence—clearer. In December 2012, a troubled teenager shot twenty-six people, some teachers but mostly small children, at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. The horror of this event shocked the world. In the days that followed, there were questions on radio, television, and the Internet, in magazines and newspapers: How could this have happened? What can be done to prevent it from happening again? Would new gun-safety laws safeguard our communities? Could the president and Congress agree on such legislation?

Amid these questions, however, another question, one not asked by pundits but by regular people, came to the fore: Where was God at Sandy Hook? The conversation took place in blogs and social media, in sermons and public memorials, in coffeehouses and around dining-room tables. Some people proclaimed that God was in heaven, waiting to welcome the victims with open arms; others declared that a distant, judging God permitted such violence as a blood sacrifice for national sins; a few opined that God had directed the heroic acts of teachers who saved their students or the police who arrived on scene. And then, of course, there were those who insisted that God had nothing to do with any of it, because God either does not intervene in human affairs or does not exist at all. Sandy Hook held up a spiritual mirror to our time, revealing a theological argument regarding God not often visible in public.

If the question was surprising, it is perhaps astonishing that a consensus emerged from the discussion. By far the most often repeated answer, and apparently the most comforting, was that God was with the victims. God was with them? With us?

During past times of profound public tragedy, such as the Battle of Gettysburg, the sinking of the Titanic, or the attack on Pearl Harbor, very few people thought to ask, Where is God? Most assumed that they knew where God was: in heaven, up in the divine throne room. Instead, our ancestors asked: Why did God let this happen? or What is God trying to teach us? or What does God want us to do in response? The older questions sought to discern God’s intentions when terrible things occurred, not to query the location of the divinity.

We have heard this question with sad frequency in recent years. Where is God? arose from the rubble of the World Trade Center; from the inundated villages of tsunami-ravaged Thailand and Indonesia; from New Orleans, as the levees breaking swept all that was familiar out to sea; from African hamlets where the dead mount from Ebola; from the hidden, abused, and lost victims of human trafficking and slavery; from killing fields in any number of nations where war seems endless; and from native peoples watching their homelands sink into the earth or ocean due to melting tundra or rising seas. Where is God? has echoed from every corner of the planet in recent years in circumstances so dire that many wonder whether we have been abandoned and left to fend for ourselves. The case could be made that the first years of the twenty-first century could be called the Age of Anxiety or the Age of Fear; there are far too many reasons to believe that human history has tipped toward ultimate destruction. Hope is at a premium, but the supply is perilously short. Fear is both cheap and plentiful.

Where is God? is one of the most consequential questions of our times. Some stubbornly maintain that a distant God sits on his heavenly throne watching all these things, acting as either a divine puppet master or a stern judge of human affairs, ready at a moment’s notice to throw more thunderbolts or toss the whole human race into an eternal lake of fire. But this is a vision of God whose time may be up, for such a divinity looks either increasingly absurd or suspiciously like a monster. And people know that, for a substantial number of them now say that God is not, thus eliminating a divine throne-sitter completely and leaving responsibility for the global mess squarely on human shoulders. Humanism, agnosticism, atheism, and posttheism are all on the rise—perfectly logical choices with which thoughtful people should at least sympathize.

Yet while some have concluded that it is indeed the case that we humans are alone, others have looked at these same events and suggested a much different spiritual possibility: God is with us. It is a wildly improbable turn of theological events to claim that God is with victims of war, terrorism, or natural disaster, with the valorous who run toward burning buildings or navigate flooding streets, and with those who mourn and doubt and even despair. As Bonhoeffer said, Only a suffering God can help. God is with us in and through all these terrible events.

Jewish scholar Abraham Heschel referred to this God as the God of pathos, who loves the world profoundly, feels with creation, and participates in its life. This means, of course, that God is with us not only in times of misery and anguish. Human beings have a tendency to ask important questions when tragedy strikes, but God is also in the midst of joy, when we forget to ask, and in life’s more mundane experiences. In the years since Heschel wrote, a cultural language of divine nearness has come to surround us—God can be found at the seashore, in a sunset, in the gardens we plant, at home, in the work we do, in the games we watch or play, in the stories that entertain us, in good food and good company, when we eat, drink, laugh, and even make love. People who identify as spiritual but not religious or religiously unaffiliated use a vocabulary of theological intimacy, as do many who identify with more traditional faiths. Although some still worship a distant majesty and others deny divine existence, many millions of contemporary people experience God as far more personal and accessible than ever before.

There is much evidence for religious decline across the West, and much attention is paid to the growth of fundamentalist religions, especially in the Global South and developing world. But, in some ways, theories of decline or growth are not really the point. Roiling around the planet is a shifting conception of God. In a wide variety of cultures, God has become unmediated and local, animating the natural world and human activity in profoundly intimate ways. Of course, this has always been the path of mystics in the world’s religions, what I often call the minor chord of faith. Now, however, the personal, mystical, immediate, and intimate is emerging as the dominant way of engaging the divine. What was once reserved for a few saints has now become the quest of millions around the planet—to be able to touch, feel, and know God for one’s self.

This is an unexpected challenge for all the world’s great faiths. Religion is changing because its deepest questions, those regarding the relationship between God and the world, are being asked in new ways. For the last several centuries, the primary questions regarding God and the world were of dogma or practice: Who is God? What must I do to be a good person or to be saved? Every religion answered such questions differently, and human beings typically accepted what their natal faith taught them. Religious institutions passed on particular traditions and served as mediating structures between that which was holy and that which was mundane. But faith questions now center on finding God—Where is God?—and figuring out what discovering the sacred here means—How does God’s presence enliven our actions in the world? Simply put, the informational queries of who and what, along with their authoritative answers, have been traded for the experiential and open-ended concerns of where and how.

Not only have the questions changed, but the way we ask them has changed as well. We no longer live isolated behind boundaries of ethnicity, race, or religion. We are connected in global community. We search the Internet for answers; we ask our Buddhist or Hindu neighbors; we read our own sacred texts and the texts of others; we listen to preachers from the world’s religions. Answers are no longer confined to the opinions of a local priest, mullah, rabbi, or guru. The answers depend on us figuring this out together. This shift in religious consciousness is a worldwide phenomenon, a sort of divine web in which we are tangled. Although atheists and humanists might look upon this askance, as a return to superstition, it is equally legitimate to read the shift as a reenchantment of the world, a spiritual revolution of astonishing scope. And everyone is caught up in the web.

In 1974, anthropologist David Buchdahl argued that a culture’s understanding of God was central to its larger practices of social and political life. And when a culture’s God is under stress or under-going revision, the whole system is strained. Buchdahl claimed, A change in the conception of God is a cultural event of some magnitude, especially because the character of a culture is heavily influenced by the notion of God that predominates within it.¹ If that is true, and I believe it to be so, it is no longer a singular reality—for Buchdahl was speaking of a culture—but this is now happening among many cultures, a planet-wide transformation of the way human life is shaped and organized. On the face of it, the question Where is God? might appear to be an arcane theological notion, but it is, in reality, a profound contemporary global inquiry. Depending on how it is answered, Where is God? could be a social and political question with sweeping consequences for the future. To relocate God is to reground our lives.

Where is God? God is here. How shall we act upon that? Well, that is up to us.

God With(in) the World

Here in the labyrinth, I struggle to find words to describe what I feel. Up on the mountaintop, I knew the language to describe God: majestic, transcendent, all-powerful, heavenly Father, Lord, and King. In this vocabulary, God remains stubbornly located in a few select places, mostly in external realms above or beyond: heaven, the church, doctrine, or the sacraments. What happens in the labyrinth seems vague, perhaps even theologically elusive.

Like countless others, I have been schooled in vertical theology. Western culture, especially Western Christianity, has imprinted a certain theological template upon the spiritual imagination: God exists far off from the world and does humankind a favor when choosing to draw close. Sermons declared that God’s holiness was foreign to us and sin separated us from God. Yes, humanity was made in God’s image, but we had so messed things up in the Garden of Eden that any trace of God in us was obscured, if not destroyed. Whether conservative or liberal, most American churches teach some form of the idea that God exists in holy isolation, untouched by the messiness of creation, and that we, God’s children, are morally and spiritually filthy, bereft of all goodness, utterly unworthy to stand before the Divine Presence. In its crudest form, the role of religion (whether through revivals, priesthood, ritual, story, sacraments, personal conversion, or morality) is to act as a holy elevator between God above and those muddling around down below in the world.

Despite my familiarity with conventional theology, I do have experience of another sort of language for God, for throughout my life something odd kept happening to me. God showed up. The first time God showed up I was very small, three, maybe four. My parents and I were playing in the surf at a beach. An unexpected wave ripped me away from my father’s hand, pushing me under its crest. As I rolled beneath the waters, my eyes opened and I saw the sun, bright but oddly indistinct at the same time, its light diffused all around me, drawing me toward its source. Everything was blue, gold, and white. Water, sand, and sun: all was suddenly one. It was beautiful and terrifying. I felt suspended, without any real sense of either time or space. Then suddenly my father reached into the water and pulled me to the surface, where I both cried and choked. Many years later, my mother told me that I had nearly drowned.

And it has often been the same since. God, the spirit of wonder, or Jesus—it is often hard to label exactly—shows up in prayer; while walking on paths, hiking in the desert, or sitting in the sunshine; in the animals that cross my way; and in my dreams. For whatever reason, my soul has a mile-wide mystical streak. My friends regularly joke that, had I been born during the Middle Ages, I would have been condemned as a witch (and that is not really funny, for hundreds of thousands of people were killed by religious authorities for this very thing). When younger, I feared talking about it; my church did not help me understand it. But now I know that it is not that terribly unusual. Much of contemporary memoir is a literature of spiritual experience, including accounts of near-death experiences and profound encounters resulting from nature, service to others, or engaging in the arts. Half of all American adults, even some who call themselves atheists or nonbelievers, report having had such an experience at least once in their lives.²

The language of mysticism and spiritual experience cuts a wide swath through the world’s religious traditions, and it presents an alternative theology, that of connection and intimacy. In Christian tradition, Jesus speaks this language when he claims, The Father and I are one (John 10:30), and when he breathes on his followers and fills them with God’s Spirit (20:22); it appears in the testimony of the apostle Paul, who converts during a mystical encounter with Christ on a road; and it fills the effusive poetry of John the Evangelist, whose vision of God is nothing short of one in which the whole of creation is absorbed into love. When the Bible is read from the perspective of divine nearness, it becomes clear that most prophets, poets, and preachers are particularly worried about religious institutions and practices that perpetuate the gap between God and humanity, making the divine unapproachable or cordoned off behind cadres of priestly mediators, whose interest is in exercising their own power as brokers of salvation. The biblical narrative is that of a God who comes close, compelled by a burning desire to make heaven on earth and occupy human hearts.

One need not be a mystic or have had a near-death experience to understand this; it need not be the result of years of technical training in some spiritual practice of enlightenment. This has become a prominent contemporary way of speaking about God that reflects a wisdom found in ancient scriptures, a spiritual vocabulary articulated by biblical heroes, saints, reformers, and the humble poor through the ages.³ And this impulse toward spiritual intimacy is found not only in the Abrahamic faiths, but in Buddhism, Hinduism, and native religions. Far too many people who understand God in these ways probably do not know how rich the tradition is that speaks of God with us, God in the stars and sunrise, God as the face of their neighbor, God in the act of justice, or God as the wonder of love. The language of divine nearness is the very heart of vibrant faith. Yet it has often been obscured by vertical theologies and elevator institutions, which, I suspect, are far easier to both explain and control. Drawing God within the circle of the world is a messy and sometimes dangerous business.

In the middle of the twentieth century, theologian H. Richard Niebuhr wrote a bestselling and influential book about the problem of God’s location entitled Christ and Culture.⁴ Using Christian history and language, he identified five potential ways that God, that is, Christ, related to the world, that is, culture. According to Niebuhr, God might be seen as being (1) against the world, (2) of the world, (3) above the world, (4) paradoxically in tension with the world, or (5) in a perpetual struggle to transform the world. Although the book is almost seven decades old and much is dated, teachers and preachers still summon these categories to explain God and the world. Four of the five categories (against, above, in tension with, and transforming) emphasize God’s distinctiveness, underscoring the idea of a distant divinity, and make the world a problem to be fixed or an obstacle to be overcome. Only one category (and the type Niebuhr most strongly ridiculed), of, portrayed God as close and the world of human experience, history, nature, and culture as a meaningful stage of divine action. When it comes to Christian theology,